Organic farmer Tom Willey comments on UC’s new organic research land

May 14, 2007

Madera County organic farmer Tom Willey weighed in yesterday with what I would describe as cautious appreciation for the decision to dedicate 10 acres at the UC Kearney Research and Extension Center to research on organic farming. Willey’s comments were published in the weekly newsletter “What’s Growin’ On,” which accompanies the boxes of fruit and vegetables that go to his farm’s “subscribers.”

Willey runs a Community Supported Agriculture program, in which consumers pay a monthly subscription to receive a weekly box of fruit and vegetables. Here's a link to his farm's Web site. Since I am a subscriber, I receive the delicious fresh produce and the newsletter, which includes an update on the farm, recipes featuring fruit and vegetables in the box, and Willey’s column, “Farther Afield.” In the column, he notes that, when asked to comment about the land newly designated for organic research, he has “weighed my words judiciously.” “California’s organic farmers . . . over the last quarter century have conducted their own ‘bootstrap’ research and shared it through a uniquely open network. A conundrum with organic research is that wholistic growing systems mimic the multilayered complexity of natural ecologies and resist simple analysis for single input response so common to conventional agriculture’s inquiry.” He closes: “Let’s hope that tenacious local farm advisor Richard Molinar’s little plot at Kearney is a harbinger of an equally rapid growth of the too long dormant partnership between California’s great university and the burgeoning organic community.”